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I'm Henry Olson, and welcome back to The Horse Race. We'll be talking about Trump's support with white working class voters this week with The Economist's James Astle, and we'll also look at a pair of distinctly New York advertisements by Congressman Max Rose on Ads of the Week. The horses are at the starting gate. They're off.
This week on The Horse Race, I am honored to be joined by James Astle. James is an Englishman who is here on assignment from The Economist. He is the D.C. Bureau Chief and the now no longer anonymous columnist for Lexington, The Economist's traditional column that looks at all things Americana and especially American politics. James, welcome to The Horse Race. Good to be here, Henry.
Well, you've been following this as intently as anybody, but you recently wrote a column about a unique focus group that you have been carrying on over the last few years. Why don't you tell our listeners who that focus group consists of and what you have learned? So about a week before the 2016 election, I did a tour of construction sites in Youngstown, Ohio, with a
a local construction union boss who I befriended. And if you recall, as you will, Henry, that was a time when, you know, specifically there was a lot of chatter about which way unionised workers would go in the upper Midwest, democratic workers,
Strategists still couldn't sort of believe that unionized workers would vote apparently against their interests for a party that was hostile to unions, leaving the bosom of a party, the Democratic Party, that had branded itself around unions.
So that was one thing. But more broadly, I was interested in the nature of Trump's hold on, if you like, white working class men, in particular in the Midwest. And again, that was in the context of a debate about whether there was an economic rationale to the particular tug of
Trump to those voters or whether there was a cultural, including racial element to that attachment. And I went to Youngstown to try to answer those questions and found it very rich and interesting reporting. So I went back a week before last and
to Youngstown to the same union boss who I kept in touch with over the past four years and redid that tour, spoke to, he runs a local union so he has 400 members, I may have spoken to some of the exact same construction workers that I spoke to in 2016, anyway I spoke to the same pool of unionised Youngstown, mostly white construction workers, working men,
earning reasonable money around sort of 35 bucks an hour, call it $60,000 a year, good money in fact, for laying bricks and cement. And I wanted to know
how they were feeling about the election and how specifically they were feeling about Trump in the context of many of them having voted for a Republican president for the first time because of Donald Trump back in 2016. And what did you find in this most recent visit? Are they, you know, the Democratic strategists here like to tell us that Joe Biden, Scranton Joe, will have a greater appeal with precisely this type of worker. Joe Biden has rolled out policy programs around the slogan Buy America that's designed to
to persuade at least some of these people to come back home. That would be the way a Democrat might think about it. Are some of these workers coming back home or is the president maintaining huge margins among this admittedly unrepresentative in a quantitative sense, but very representative in an ethnographic sense, group of voters? Well, we know, Henry, of course, that the president has lost
a margin in current polling of his vote with this demographic. So I wasn't sort of trying to prove or disprove what the polls, far broader and more mathematical snapshot, if you like, of the electorate tell us with this focus group.
But qualitatively, I was interested to know who was hanging with the president, who might be leaving with the president. And what I found was no evidence of anybody really leaving the president. There were Trump voters on the sites that
that were prepared to acknowledge that there was a bit too much chaos, that maybe the president tweets too much, that old chestnut. Maybe there was just too much noise and chaos in the federal government, and they were getting weary of it. But they were still going to vote for Trump. He was their man. They couldn't imagine voting for a Democrat now, by and large. And lots of them praised the economy, which...
is good still if you're a construction worker in Youngstown, notwithstanding COVID-19. So what I found was that those who had voted for Trump in this snapshot, in this focus group as you describe it,
Those who had voted for Trump in 2016 were still with Trump and, moreover, were by and large, notwithstanding those caveats, much more attached to the president than they had been in 2016. They were sort of taking a punt on Trump in 2016. Now they sounded much more sort of infused with partisanship and actually, you know, extraordinarily, extraordinarily powerful.
had a sort of religious fervor, some of them in their appreciation of the president. Hugely exaggerated stories of what he'd done or indeed fantastical versions of what he'd done in office.
And then I suppose a good portion, perhaps a third or more of the construction workers just didn't care, felt very remote from politics at the same time. I didn't get a sense that many people or any people who had not voted for the president in 2016 had come over to him. In fact, I found no voter.
of that kind on the sites and then there were just a couple of voters who were sticking with the democratic party and i would say that they were more the the bosses than the workers on those sites that's an interesting tidbit um but that's both good news and bad news for the president in the one sense
Good news is that here's people who are sticking by their man through thick or thin. Bad news is, given the polls' clear demonstration of Trump's slippage among whites with a college degree, he really needs either to get a larger margin or a higher turnout, or ideally both, among this demographic if he's going to pull off the squeaker electoral college win that is their only realistic path to strategy.
What's your sense more leaving the focus group behind and going to your broader research and journalism? What's your sense of of the race right now? Is there a chance that Trump is below the radar doing this sort of thing? Or is it look as bad to you as it does to many pundits who look at the daily drumbeat of polls showing him behind Biden outside the margin of error?
The worst news for the president is clearly the stability of the gap. I was looking at some polling, actually just the real clear politics average yesterday.
And he was around seven points behind Biden in head to head polling for what that was worth in October last year. He's now about seven points behind Biden. Suggests that, you know, if you like, on the upside for Trump, his handling of the pandemic, which is unpopular, the calamity that the pandemic has brought to the economy, which a portion of the electorate at least blames on the president. Many don't.
hasn't actually had that much impact any which way. But at the same time, it suggests that the vast majority of voters made their minds up about this race long, long ago and not in the president's favor. The good news for the president is, of course, that seven points in the context of the Republican Electoral College advantage is not far outside a possible margin
of error. So we don't, I think, see any signs of slippage by Biden or advance by the president. And there just seems to be too much polling and too much mindfulness to the to the areas of last time around for me to be terribly sceptical.
of the picture that we're getting from the polls. But there wouldn't need to be that much change for Trump to come roaring back into competitiveness, I'd say. - So you've been here since pretty much for the entirety, here by, I mean here in Washington with The Economist, for pretty much the entirety of the Trump phenomena. We were sharing that
that you arrived here, although we didn't meet immediately, in September of 2015. So you have been able to watch the rise of the American empire was World War II to the end of the Cold War. You've been able to watch the rapid decline of the body politic close up. What's your sense of
both on a policy perspective and a deeper, more personal health of the country perspective of the effect of Trump five years on. So I think one wanted to be upbeat about the president's record. You'd have to say that he has done no great harm to the economy. I think he's absolutely not unproductive.
taken even interest in the sort of structural imbalances in the economy that he promised to do in his election campaign. But he hasn't, he's run a relatively even keel. And in foreign policy, there have been important shifts and the most important it may be, and I think the easiest to praise him for is certainly the reorientation of Americans'
of American diplomacy on China. I think the degree to which he has led that process has been exaggerated. I think it would have happened under an alternative Republican or indeed a Democratic president. But nonetheless, he must get the credit for being the man in the seat when America changed its tone on China and looked more skeptically at its relations with China. I think that he has
He's run an extraordinarily contradictory and muddle-headed Middle East policy, which has been bad in many regards. I think that the turning away from the Iran deal was a straightforward own goal on America's part. But at the same time, his basic skepticism of military adventurism has sort of put a floor on how bad things could get. There are certainly some around him
on Iran, in particular, who would have led America into war by now. And the president's instincts are all against that. And that's a good thing. I think that domestically, otherwise, there's a lot to criticize and not a great deal to praise. Yes, for sure, he's been better than an alternative Republican president might have been on criminal justice reform. But let's face it,
his reform was much, much more modest than any generic Democrat would have rightly set about. And I think that...
Although the widespread popular concern about the border and illegal immigration had to be addressed by any administration, the president has not done that in a productive or indeed efficient manner. But before we sort of move on from there to the politics, Henry, can I just say that the thing that I was always most worried about was, if you like, the intersection between policy and politics, which is the way that the president was going to
to interact with the bureaucracy, to run the institutions of government. And here I think his record has been genuinely diabolical. I think that his politicising of the DOJ, DHS and other institutions wearing away whatever final vestige of independence Congress and the institutions around it had has been...
extremely damaging to the country and to the federal government. And I think that given where politics now sit, it will be much, much harder to undo that damage after Trump goes, whether he's succeeded by a Republican or a Democrat. And if he's reelected, I think we should worry about the institutions of government a great deal. And on the politics, as you inferred in the question, I don't think
I don't think anybody could interpret Trump's tenure as being anything other than extraordinarily divisive. He hasn't invented these divisions. He hasn't set Americans against each other in a way that would have been unfamiliar before Trump.
But he has made deepening those divisions, especially around their most neuralgic, tenderest spots concerning the lines of race and generational differences, class differences that run around the country. He has honed in like a bully on those weak points in the polity and kicked them hardest. And again, I think the
The effect, the bruising effect of that impact on the democracy is very, very unfortunate. So let's say one of the things that I have found immensely frustrating over the last four years is the constant statements by people who are opposed to Trump about danger to democracy, awful person, how can you morally vote for this person? And then many, I'm not talking about you or many people in the media, but the political leadership says,
doing absolutely nothing with respect to policy to address some of the fears that people might have. Danny Pletka, a former colleague of mine at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote an op-ed in my paper, The Washington Post, that I, from experience talking to Republican voters, know full well, which is I can't stand Trump. I didn't vote for him last time. But looking at
the move to the left among Democrats scares me. And I don't want that move. Why do you think the Democrats have made the,
a fetish of talking about decency and democracy while simultaneously moving in a direction on policy that heightens the conflict many Republicans feel rather than in the name of decency and democracy, lowering that conflict. Let me try and break down your question. If I've understood it properly, Henry, I think that, um, that,
First of all, you know, we can all get very jaded about politics and there's plenty of error on both sides and in every which way you look.
You know, politicians, if not, if not rascals, tend to tend to put up with rascalish behavior in their careers. But that said, the depravity of some of the president's language is not something that we should write off as just.
partisan, you know, politics as normal. And I don't think that you can fault the president's critics. And I have no dog in this fight. I'm an observer. I don't think you can fault the president's critics, formerly on the Republican side, now almost entirely on the Democratic side, for making moral cases against the way that he's used the bully pulpit. So I would just leave that there. And in terms of whether Democrats are
are hurting their own cause, if you like, by moving to the left. I'd say that in some senses, for sure, you know, the...
The idiocy of cancel culture, such as it is, the extent to which it seeped from campuses into general political discussion, is completely unhelpful. On sexual politics too, I think that the Democratic Party is playing around with identities that, you know,
most American voters simply can't make sense of. They don't understand why there needs to be such a large public debate about trans politics, something so remote from the vast majority of Americans' lives and scary to many, it must be said. But I would dispute with you that there's been the general wholesale lurch to the left of
that is often described. I don't see that. Biden is the Democratic nominee and plainly doesn't represent the leftist activist world that Twitter is suffused with and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez comes from. The Democratic Party has given a more prominent role to those voices, has been influenced by those voices, but
But that is not yet the Democratic Party. And Biden's nomination with that extraordinary vote, that extraordinary rush of steady support for Biden that he got in the primaries before and after Super Tuesday suggests that that's not where the balance of power lies in the Democratic Party. And I just don't think the evidence suggests otherwise.
So switching gears just a little bit, what did you find most challenging coming over here five years ago in trying to get your head around American politics and American government? And what did you find least challenging? In a sense, what's least challenging is what one must be careful of, because, you know, growing up in the UK and studying its politics and its
to a fair degree america's politics there's an awful lot that's familiar about american politics and american voters and the conversation over here when you know you really get stuck into it
At the same time, that's also a potential danger because you can not think deeply and not realise just how different things really are here. Kind of familiar as they may sound, the American system is just so unique. The degree of decentralisation, the diversity of politics around the enormity of the country,
really is unique to America. And I, you know, I often found myself harking back to my experience in India, where I lived for five years, more than my experience writing about British politics. So if you like, there's a degree of familiarity, but one that I was constantly having to sort of caution myself on. And what's most difficult, I guess, is that
the complexity of the system, the diversity of the politics, and at the same time, you know, marrying that with this sort of thunderous partisan division that we've got. So politics, as famously said, has been nationalised to a degree. Partisanship is this vice that's gripped American politics to a degree, but you have to sort of get the balance right, understanding that local still matters.
One of the things I was over in your country to cover the election last year. And as you know, I have more than a normal American followed the ins and outs of your home country over the last few years. And passions were high around the Brexit debate. It was the future of the country, the sort of people we want to be.
And then Boris Johnson wins. And it's like it's all over. You know, there's not a last ditch revolt. Nobody's trying to stop him in the courts. What can Americans who care deeply about policy but love their country first learn from the way your home country handled the Brexit debate and the aftermath of Boris Johnson's victory?
Yeah, it's a great question, Henry. And I'm nervous to try to give you an answer because I'm sure you've thought about this more deeply than me and have a better answer already. I think that the Brexit question is sort of,
operationally settled, if you like. The Tory government has a huge majority and ostensibly won that mandate around pushing through with Brexit and it should, with its majority, have licence to arrange the Brexit that it wants. But we are seeing right now in Parliament continuation, actually, of the same rowing that we had
um last year and the year before that because um the the the government wants to not only break its word on its brexit arrangements in in pushing for a cleaner break with the eu it wants to break international law is it as it admitted in parliament and on that i guess um there's no doubt that you know critical as i am of of the way that the tory government has gone about brexit and um
and frankly the cynicism of the Prime Minister in particular, the pushback from Tory grandees saying, no, I'm a Brexiteer, but there's something more important here.
Britain's international reputation. It's sticking by the letter of the law, honouring your commitments. These things all matter. And there's been a quite considerable already and mounting rebellion in the governing party against the Prime Minister's plans on that. And I can't help but be dismayed by the comparison between that pushback
and the total supplication in the Republican Party, in the congressional Republican Party to the present, despite the fact that we all know, I know very well, that a large number of Republican congressmen and women are appalled by what Trump does on a daily basis. So I think that that's a sort of, it's a cautionary and rather depressing comparison for Americans. In terms of settling these long-term
long-running sores. Well, you know, comparison between Brexit and almost anything in American politics is a little bit hard to make because nobody really cared about Brexit all that much before the referendum sort of framed and crystallised the issue. That's why David Cameron, who took the country into that referendum, assumed that he would just breeze through it and Britain's EU membership wouldn't be threatened.
It turned out that only by giving real focus to the issue could you raise its salience, and then it became problematic. And I'm sort of grasping for what the comparable issue would be in American politics. Well, as a final thought,
How much conscious effort do Americans need to place, regardless of who wins? Because whichever side wins, the other side will either feel cheated and fearful or something worse. How much conscious effort do you think Americans have to put into national reconciliation in order to get out of this deadly death spiral of the political war of all against all?
I mean, one would like to say a lot, a lot of emphasis, because as polling was telling us even before Donald Trump's emergence, and indeed this was part of the kind of, you know, fertile ground that Trump was sort of sown into, political differences are bleeding into personal relations in America in this, you know, appalling time.
way. People would rather their children didn't date or marry
somebody from the other side, so to speak. They'd rather not work with somebody from the other side. They tend to think that the other side is not just different from them on issues, but bad. That's a horrifying development in American democracy. I would say that notwithstanding the polling, which I acknowledge, it's not by and large been my experience of American Americans
moving around the country. And I think, again, you know, we have plenty of evidence to suggest that on a local, neighbourly level, all this poisonous national politics just to a great extent doesn't percolate through. So does America need reconciliation? Well, it palpably does. I don't see any possibility of that in national politics as things stand without a
fundamental realignment of the party coalitions, which may come, but perhaps not soon. On a local level, maybe things aren't quite as bad as we fear they are, especially right now, sitting in the middle of this very ugly presidential election campaign, which is only weeks away. Well, thank you as ever, James, for your insights, and I hope that you can return to the horse race. I'd love to, Henry. It's great to speak to you.
This week for the ad of the week, we're going to go to New York City. I'm not talking about the Big Apple of Manhattan. I'm talking about the Forgotten Borough of Staten Island. There's a competitive race there because this is one of the few areas of New York which will be willing to elect Republicans. Democratic incumbent Max Rose won this seat in 2018, and he's trying to hold off Republican Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis.
He's got a couple of ads that can be described as only in New York. Let's listen to the first one. Bill de Blasio is the worst mayor in the history of New York City. That's it, guys. Seriously, that's the whole ad.
Yeah, that is the whole ad. It's kind of amazing. It's got to be the shortest political ad with the fewest amount of words that I have seen in my career. But that doesn't mean it's ineffective. Let's think about what Staten Island is. Staten Island is a borough of homeowners in a city of renters. It is a borough that voted over 56 percent for Donald Trump.
and voted for Republicans in most presidential elections in the last 20 years, going only for Barack Obama in 2012 by a very narrow margin.
This is also a borough that is known to be home to a lot of city workers, and particularly the sort of city workers who might be upset by the rioting and stuff that's going on in New York City that Bill de Blasio has perceived by many as at least condoning, if not permitting. This is a city borough that 22% of work for the government in some way, 10% of New York's cops,
live here, even though only 5% of the city's population live there. And a 2014 poll taken at the time of the controversy over the death of Eric Garner showed that 73% of Staten Island residents approved of the New York Police Department when barely half of the city as a whole did. Bill de Blasio is incredibly unpopular.
among Staten Islanders. And what Max Rose is doing here is associating himself very simply, very bluntly, very clearly with an opinion that nearly everybody in Staten Island and certainly a lot of the people who he needs to attract hold that Bill de Blasio is the worst mayor in the history of New York City. Short story.
short, sweet, to the point, designed to appeal to that working class, middle income person who is the key Staten Island voter. Visually, this also reinforces the message. He has no suit. He's wearing basically a polo shirt. He's on a street. He's talking informally. And this is, again, all designed to appeal
put the idea into the Staten Islanders' mind, Max Rose, just like us. It's a classic political technique, this time delivered with one sentence and 15 seconds of airtime. The second ad is also classic New York, and it's a little more typically political, although it has its own particular style that I'd like you to be attuned to. Let's listen to this one.
When Nicole Malliotakis was learning how to lie in Albany, I was carrying an M4 in Afghanistan. And when I bled for my country, she was making blood money off the opioid companies that kill our kids, then fought to give them a tax cut, paid for by raising your property taxes. I'm Max Rose, and of course I'd never defund the police. I approve this message because if you want to know why Nicole's lying about me, just look at all the ways she's been screwing you over.
This is what's known in the trade as a contrast ad. We've talked about those before. Tries to show in 30 seconds why one person shouldn't be voted for and the other person should. They use in this commercial the typical contrast ad approach, which is a unflattering photo of the person who is being attacked and full color, full light on,
flattering photos of the person who you are supposed to be voting for. In this case, Nicole Maliotakis is shown talking kind of in slow motion with some sort of a filter over making it look kind of dark in what appears to be a committee room in the Albany State Assembly, the New York State Assembly in Albany. Whereas, again,
Rose is out in the street. He's showing pictures of typical Staten Island homes. He's wearing a light jacket with a casual shirt. Again, this guy's not putting on airs. He's just a boroughite like you. One thing that when he talks about afternoons,
Afghanistan, you see a picture of Rose in combat, uh, fatigues, uh, and helmet from when he was in Afghanistan. And he must've gotten wounded because he says, when I bled for my country and there's a picture of Max Rose with a head bandage, uh, on, apparently he took a hit, uh,
while he was serving the country overseas. And even his logo, which comes on the screen towards the end when he's talking about Nicole Malliotakis lying about him again, starts with a star, the sort of star you would see in a U.S. Army helmet or U.S. Army uniform, and recedes back to bring his name, the star with Max Rose for Congress, off to the right.
But I've got to say the accent is pure New York. And when he ends talking about why Nicole Malitakis is screwing with us, you know, that's the sort of borderline vulgarity that anyone in New York would see, particularly in Staten Island, as the way people talk.
But not necessarily what would fly if you were talking in, say, a upper income suburb of Houston or in some place outside of the state.
So Max Rose is in a difficult fight. Nicole Malliotakis ran against Bill de Blasio in 2017 as the Republican nominee. She lost heavily statewide, but she won 70 percent of the vote against de Blasio.
in Staten Island. She's not going to get 70% against Max Rose, but by these two commercials, he shows he knows he's got a fight on his hand. He knows who he needs to talk to, and he's honing the message in a way that increases his chances among this particular and unique demographic. And that's why these two ads are the ads of the week. ♪
That's it for this week's horse race. Join me again for more expert analysis and a special new feature that will be premiering on the next episode. I'm Henry Olson, and I'll see you in the winner's circle.
